1. Technical Field
This patent application relates generally to data organization and presentation, and more particularly, but not by way of limitation, to systems and methods for universal presentation of data.
2. History of Related Art
Traditionally, the Internet was viewed as a type of collaboration mechanism for exchanging existing content among individual computers. In the same way, data sharing occurred among applications rather than as atomic units of data that reside on the Internet. More recently, cloud computing has been developed in attempts to address some of these problems.
Cloud computing focuses on transforming the concept of computing from a desktop-centric environment, where data is stored and managed locally, to a data-cloud environment that enables data access from any location. Instead of being constrained by limitations regarding where data is located on a network, a data cloud allows any piece of data to be accessible anywhere on any connected device. However, with both web and desktop applications, there are problems with how this cloud-like data is presented and managed by prior art user interfaces. Prior art methods of displaying cloud-like data can generally be classified into one of two categories. One can structure the data very generically inside of web pages that are managed by a containing application, such as hyper-text documents that are managed by a web browser, or one can provide a hard-coded representation of the data using, for example, widgets, as in desktop applications.
Due to structuring of the cloud-like data in terms of either generic representations or inflexible widgets, a user interface has no understanding of the underlying nature of the content. The means of manipulating and accessing data is only relevant to a specific type of data that the user interface supports. There is no way to have the user interface, regardless of how capable the data platform is, use the data outside of the interface or even for the data to be understood outside of a context in which it resides. Moreover, any additional piece of data can only be used in the context of the limited mechanisms provided by the interface.